Stephanie Mencimer

Reporter

Stephanie works in Mother Jones' Washington bureau. A Utah native and graduate of a crappy public university not worth mentioning, she has spent several years hanging out with angry white people who occasionally don tricorne hats and come to lunch meetings heavily armed.

Stephanie covers legal affairs and domestic policy in Mother Jones' Washington bureau. She is the author of Blocking the Courthouse Door: How the Republican Party and Its Corporate Allies Are Taking Away Your Right to Sue. A contributing editor of the Washington Monthly, a former investigative reporter at the Washington Post, and a senior writer at the Washington City Paper, she was nominated for a National Magazine Award in 2004 for a Washington Monthly article about myths surrounding the medical malpractice system. In 2000, she won the Harry Chapin Media award for reporting on poverty and hunger, and her 2010 story in Mother Jones of the collapse of the welfare system in Georgia and elsewhere won a Casey Medal for Meritorious Journalism.

You probably didn't know it, but today is Constitution Day, a federally designated holiday created in 2004 by the late West Virginia Sen. Robert Byrd (D). While no one gets the day off, the law does require all public schools to devote some time to teaching the Constitution on this day each year. The law, impossible to enforce in already overstretched schools, might have died with Byrd if it weren't for the tea party movement. Tea partiers have seized on the congressional mandate to try to force public schools to introduce the movement's version of constitutional history to impressionable youth.

The Tea Party Patriots especially have been working hard over the past six months to pressure school boards and school officials to teach constitutional history as written by Glenn Beck’s favorite author, W. Cleon Skousen, a rabid anti-Communist Mormon whose texts have been knocked for including white supremacist dogma and racist commentary. In Skousen's view, the US was founded as a Christian nation, possibly by descendants of a lost tribe of Israel, a view that might run into trouble in a public school.

It's unclear how many schools have actually taken the plunge, but the tea partiers have been successful in one respect: they've energized a bunch of liberal legal types who have been horrified at the way the tea party and its favorite legislators have been interpreting the Constitution.

To that end, this week, the liberal Constitutional Accountability Center and the People for the American Way Foundation, among others, launched a new project called Constitutional Progressives, with the intent of trying to correct the record. Doug Kendall, one of the main instigators of the project and head of the CAC, said in a conference call this week that they've decided to fight back because, "It seems tea party thinks the entire 20th century is unconstitutional."

The Constiutional Progressives certainly have plenty of material to highlight.

The execs who set up shell companies to funnel millions to a pro-Romney PAC are connected to the same Utah firm that regulators have sued for scamming consumers.

Mitt Romney is probably best known for his work at the private equity firm Bain Capital. But the former Massachusetts governor and current GOP presidential contender also has close ties to a Utah-based company—one that doesn't have quite the cachet of the Wall Street power broker Bain. Instead, some of Romney's most loyal financial backers hail from a Provo, Utah-based company called Nu Skin that has had repeated run-ins with federal regulators for deceptive business practices and has been criticized as nothing more than a pyramid scheme.

In August, MSNBC broke the news that a new super-PAC had been created to support Mitt Romney's presidential bid, and that one of the donors was essentially a shell company that dissolved right after giving $1 million to the PAC. Buried in the story, though, was some other interesting news about the PAC's funders. Two other companies later outed as shell corporations that didn't do any business also donated $1 million each to the super-PAC. Both of those companies were founded by top operatives of Nu Skin, including the former CEO and cofounder of the firm, Steven Lund, a longtime Romney supporter. On Monday, the Washington Post noted that Lund is a big Romney supporter and described his firm as one that specializes in anti-aging creams.

But what the Post missed is that unlike the Wall Street financial whizzes Romney is usually associated with, Nu Skin is what's known as a multilevel marketing firm. It supposedly sells vitamins and skin care products (the Post called Lund the "luxury cosmetics king"). But virtually none of its revenue comes from selling anything. Instead, its money comes from recruiting a never-ending stream of new distributors who are the primary buyers of the company's products and who pay to attend seminars in the hopes of making big bucks. Of course, most of the people who take the plunge lose money rather than earning it. As a result, Nu Skin has a long and troubled history with regulators dating back to the early 1990s, when several states were investigating the company for operating a pyramid scheme.

In 1992, Nu Skin settled a threatened lawsuit with the Michigan attorney general's office and four other states, promising to clean up its business practices and to pay $25,000 to cover the cost of the investigation. It later paid $85,000 to settle a suit with Connecticut, where then-attorney general (and current US senator) Richard Blumenthal had filed suit alleging that it was an illegal pyramid scheme. (Incidentally, during this time when Nu Skin was under fire from state consumer protection officials, its official spokesperson was Jason Chaffetz, who now represents Utah's 3rd District in Congress.)

If Clarence Thomas was hoping that liberals might just forget about his cozy ties to a Dallas real estate developer, or his failure for a decade to disclose the hundreds of thousands of dollars his wife earned from a conservative think tank, well, he would be wrong. As President Obama's health care reform bill gets closer and closer to a hearing before the high court, liberal groups are continuing to press for some sort of disciplinary action against Thomas, or at least to force him to recuse himself from hearing the health care case.

To that end, on Tuesday, the left-leaning Alliance for Justice and the good-government group Common Cause asked the Judicial Conference of the United States, which oversees the federal courts, to investigate whether Thomas violated the Ethics in Government Act. The groups allege that Thomas may have violated the act when he failed to disclose his wife Ginny Thomas's compensation—upwards of $700,000—from the conservative think tank Heritage Foundation.

The groups also are asking the Judicial Conference to investigate whether Thomas may have failed to report travel paid for by the Texas real estate developer Harlan Crowe, as reported by the New York Times. The Judicial Conference was holding its semi-annual meeting in DC this week when the advocacy groups sent their letter. If the Conference concludes that the allegations have merit, federal law requires that if it "has reasonable cause to believe has willfully falsified or willfully failed to file information required to be reported" it must refer the case to the attorney general. Common Cause president Bob Edgar said in a statement Tuesday:

In America, no one is above the law, including Supreme Court justices. For more than a decade, Justice Thomas omitted information about his wife’s income, clearly required by the Ethics in Government Act, from his annual financial disclosure report. Surely such a repeated violation, by someone entrusted to apply laws far more complex than the Ethics Act, at least deserves a formal review by the Judicial Conference and the Attorney General.

Odds are slim that even the Judicial Conference is going to ask Eric Holder to investigate Thomas. But you can't really fault them for trying. Thomas's lapses seem egregious enough for some higher authority to take a second look.

Unfortunately, thanks the the separation of powers doctrine, there really isn't a higher authority when it comes to the Supreme Court. Some members of Congress are trying to change that. Also this week, the Alliance for Justice has been trying to rally support for congressional hearings on a bill introduced earlier this year that would force Supreme Court justices to be covered by the code of conduct that applies to other federal judges and create new procedures for when a justice may have to recuse from hearing a case. Given that virtually no Republicans have signed on, this law, too, has no hope of going anywhere, at least not any time soon. But the Democrats behind it get points for trying anyway.

*As a completely unrelated side note, Thomas came to mind as I was reading this article earlier this week about how NASCAR has started installing solar panels and recycling and employing flocks of sheep to mow the track lawns. I have to wonder whether Thomas, a former Monsanto employee, might have second thoughts about his anti-environmental positions now that even NASCAR has gone green. A little-known fact about Thomas is that in his spare time, he and Ginny drive their gas-guzzling, 40-foot custom-built bus to NASCAR races, where they hang out with ordinary Americans who often don't even recognize the Supreme Court's most bitter member. Perhaps some of NASCAR's new-found environmental consciousness will rub off.

A record number of Americans are living below the poverty line. Ready for the worse news?

It's no secret that the economy is in rough shape—but the latest poverty figures released by the Census Bureau on Tuesday are nonetheless shocking. The overall poverty rate has reached a record high and the number of people living in deep poverty—that is, below 50 percent of the poverty level, or $11,000 for a family of four—is the highest its been since 1975. Experts are predicting that things are only going to get worse in the years to come. (Scroll down to see the data.)

Some more lowlights: Median income has sunk lower than it was almost 15 years ago. The number of people living without health insurance is up slightly. The number of kids under the age of six living in extreme poverty is up to nearly 12 percent. The recession has been especially hard on women and people of color. The extreme poverty rate for women is more than 6 percent, the highest recorded in 22 years, and the poverty rate for black women is up a percentage point from 2009, to more than 25 percent.

Ron Haskins, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, had this grim assessment of the new data: "The main message of today's…income and poverty numbers from the Census Bureau is that, if we don't like the way things are now, we better get used to it."

Brookings scholar Isabell Sawhill, who crunched the numbers, estimates that by 2014, the "Great Recession" will have added an additional 10 million people to the ranks of the poor, six million of them children.

The takeaway for liberals, of course, is that the country is in dire need of more economic stimulus, regardless of the debt situation.

"These numbers confirm what millions of Americans have long felt," said Wade Henderson, president and CEO of The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights in a statement. He added, "We cannot expect these trends to reverse themselves; concerted action is needed to create jobs and invest in vulnerable families if we are to ensure shared prosperity and opportunity for all."

The Census Bureau is slated to release the latest figures on some critical national indicators early Tuesday morning. Both poverty rates and the number of uninsured Americans will be included in the data dump, and neither figure is likely to be good.

The poverty rate has been creeping up for years. Between 2001 and 2007, poverty rose from 13.2 percent to 14.3 percent, and that was before the unemployment rate skyrocketed over 9 percent after the financial crisis and burst of the housing bubble. The Center for Budget and Policy Priorities projects that 2010 may set a new record for the number of people living in deep poverty—that is, on income below half the federal poverty level (about $11,000 for a family of four). In 2009, the country got close to that mark when 6.3 percent of the country was living that close to the edge. It won't take much for deep poverty to claim a share of the population the country hasn't seen since 1975, according to CBPP.

The numbers of uninsured people aren't likely to look any more rosy, given that unemployment has remained stubbornly high. In 2009, 51 million people lacked health insurance—one out of every 6 people—and CBPP predicts that the number for 2010 will be even higher.

The Census figures will be released at 10 a.m. Tuesday, when we'll find out for sure. But even if nothing changes much from last year, the numbers will continue to paint a gloomy financial picture for the country's most vulnerable people. As CBPP points out, the only real way to help these folks in the short term is for the government to take more action, including extending the unemployment benefits and payroll tax holiday policies that are set to expire at the end of the year. But with the congressional "supercommittee" only looking at ways to cut federal spending, it's hard to see any of that happening any time soon, regardless of what the Census has to say about just how much people are suffering.